For two decades, I’ve been among the leading scholars investigating the intersection of religion and technology, especially digital technology. My work on Apocalyptic AI, in particular, has been cited many hundreds of times; and I’ve been quoted in leading news sources, like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, Quartz, and National Geographic, and I’ve been interviewed for popular podcasts like the BBC’s Sideways and David DeSteno’s How God Works. A couple of my pop essays at Religion Dispatches went viral (one thanks to a notice from Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing). I’ve also advanced the study of religion and AI outside the US thanks to a couple of Fulbright-Nehru projects in India and an ongoing collaboration in Korea.

In particular, my work contributes to the public understanding of how religion impacts technology, especially how technology becomes religious itself. I wrote what might be the first in-depth analysis of mind uploading and the singularity (esp. by the publication of my 2010 book, Apocalyptic AI), though there were some other folks who previously engaged those ideas. See my published works for all the references. 🙂

Thanks to a Fulbright-Nehru Research Award, I spent 5 months at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in 2012-13, during which I interviewed dozens of scientists in academia, industry, and hacker culture. It offers new insights into contemporary India and into methodology in the study of religion, science, and technology. In 2018-19, I was back on sabbatical and back in India–once again under the auspices of a Fulbright-Nehru award. While there, I finished my latest book, Futures of Artificial Intelligence, and this launched a broader move toward AI ethics.

I’m pretty sure that everyone loves robots, which is why I’ve written books about them (along with books about videogames, Indian science, and — forthcoming — the end of the world). I’m also interested in the toadstool circles, the ancient temples, the soaring cathedrals of our religious imagination. Likewise, the dark tunnels of mining and rapid transit. I visit mountains, deserts, temples, laboratories, factories, virtual realities…the places where magic enters the world.